FIVE SKILLS for 21st Century Teachers

FIVE SKILLS for 21st Century Teachers

Professional Development often emerges as a daunting process of ReLearning skills for teachers. I’ve been thinking deeply on the PHASE ONE skills that ALL teachers should have. They’re pretty simple. Here’s the list:

Video/audio capture and upload NO EDITING just shoot and upload. A LOT of information can be conveyed with some SIMPLE shooting techniques. Along with THIS skills set comes a few basic of shooting: Composition, Lighting, and Sound.

Google docs collaboration and paperless workflows the students are catching on. The faculty is dragging their feet. Collaboration can be introduced and continually reinforced in GoogleDocs. PEER EDITING is one of the essential skills that students can learn from each other. It holds them accountable and it helps them practice editing grammar and spelling. Teachers need to catch on.

Google docs collections and file organization this is a SIMPLE skill that is sorta confusing inside the Docs management window. Teachers need to learn that sharing ONE collection will allow them to share thousands of documents on the fly. They only have to create a class list ONCE after that new docs just need to be tagged to that collection.

Understanding digital citizenship this is one of those NON-TECH tech skills. Digital citizenship is not just the Golden Rule of Pixel based living, but it is also the key to introducing students to 21st century engagement.

Understanding media literacy and the evaluation of sources IS WIKIPEDIA a GOOD source? The answer is not a blanket NO. TOO many teachers are teaching kids to simply avoid WIKIPEDIA. Isn’t it a stronger skills to teach students to EVALUATE and CONTRIBUTE and CORRECT Wikipedia? We need to focus on evaluating and correcting sources online. Student can be participants in their research and not just consumers of information.